Month: August 2017

It isn’t news to anyone that a full eclipse of the sun traversed the United States on Monday. You’d have to be ensconced in a lunar base on the dark side of the moon to have missed that. But if you got to experience the eclipse, especially in a place where totality occurred, you probably know how special this event was. And maybe you noticed how it was special in ways beyond the purely celestial.

I traveled from West Central Florida to the coast of South Carolina for the big event. This was the second full eclipse I’ve experienced, the first one being in March of 1970, at Cape Charles, Virginia. After that experience, I wasn’t going to miss a chance to be present for another one, especially one this close.

Without going into all the minute details, I wanted to stay flexible in terms of my precise destination since the weather was looking pretty iffy. As the morning of the eclipse went on, clouds were moving in from off the ocean and conditions were heading south almost by the minute. Viewing conditions along the coast were predicted to be fair to poor and, in the midst of all that, the Charleston weather radar went down, so I was pretty much on my own.

Charleston, which was on the southern edge of the zone of totality, was overcast as I passed through it, as was North Charleston, across the harbor. Following my inclination that conditions would be better on the coast north of the city, I continued up US 17, and that’s when I came across some signs pointing to a side road that led to the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge. Making a snap decision, I turned right there and followed that road until it ended at the refuge. Cars were parked up and down both sides of the road, so I found a place, parked, and walked in to the picnic area and boat launch site at the road’s end. Cape Romain was actually the place, virtually on the center line of the zone of totality, I had thought to view the eclipse when I first started planning this expedition.

A long concrete pier stretched out across the marsh and clumps of people were out on the pier, interspersed with some open areas. I found one of those open spots and set myself up. It was about an hour until totality.

When I arrived there were big blue breaks in the clouds, allowing the sun to shine through, but as time went on more and more clouds moved in from off the ocean. At times the clouds obscured the sun, but when they did, one could see the disk of the moon encroaching on the face of the sun. With one layer of clouds, it was too bright to see the image. With three layers, the sun was too obscured. But with two layers, it was perfect, and the moon could be seen eating the sun – as primitive peoples believed – without benefit of eclipse glasses.

With about a half-hour to go, a family of four set up next to where I was. It turned out they had come from Denmark, just to see the eclipse. As more and more people arrived, and looking up and down the pier, I was thinking how many people, not just on that pier but from coast-to-coast, had come to share in this event. I was hoping we’d get a clear view, not just for myself but for others, like that family, who had never experienced a total solar eclipse before.

Minutes before the moment of totality, more clouds passed in front of the sun. Inland and to the south things were totally socked in, with lightning strikes to the west. A bank of clouds was moving in off the ocean, but a big band of blue stood between where we were and it. The wind was blowing the lower clouds quickly, and then the wind blew them past, and there was the sun, framed by two high, thin, motionless clouds, and that was when the eclipse entered totality. And our view was unobstructed for the entire duration of the eclipse, as short as it was at about two minutes and 40 seconds. Speak about making the right decision and lucking out.

If you haven’t experienced a total eclipse, you don’t know what that moment of totality is like. Even 99.99% totality is not the same as 100%. It is when the sun is completely obscured by the moon, when the sun’s corona can be seen flaring out from behind the moon, when day turns almost to night, and when earthbound creatures express their confusion by going wild, that makes a total eclipse the awesome event that it is. Even knowing that an eclipse is happening and that it’s a natural phenomenon that has a beginning and an end, it can be a disconcerting experience. It is no wonder that people over the ages spun such myths and felt such fear around eclipses.

I have to say that the first eclipse I experienced seemed more awesome, and I think it had mostly to do with the environment. At Cape Charles, I was right on tidewater, and there were flocks of birds, and it seemed the tides reversed and the birds went crazy at the moment of the eclipse. At Cape Romain, it was marshes, and the few birds that there were had passed overhead minutes before the eclipse and flew on. But as a sheer celestial event, this eclipse was as awe-inspiring as any. This eclipse, any eclipse, reminds that we’re on an object somewhere out in space, spinning around a star, out in the vastness of the universe.

At that moment of totality, I think most people experiencing it for those couple of minutes might have forgotten the differences, the views, the beliefs, the expectations that separate us. For those couple of minutes we weren’t liberals or conservatives, Americans or Danes, dog lovers or cat lovers or none of the above. We were just humans, curious, eager, awe-inspired humans, beneath the shadow of the moon as it crossed the face of the sun. It’s too much to expect that the feeling would last much beyond the eclipse and the return of the sun from behind the moon, but it was nice while it lasted.

After the eclipse was over, it took more than four hours to get to the Interstate, with the flood of people returning to wherever they came from – the plurality of cars on my route had Florida license tags – and from there things got easier. By the next morning the eclipse seemed already to have receded into the past, a curiosity for strangers to ask about in passing.

Both on the way to South Carolina and on the way back, things seemed to be more homogenized than they had been in years past. Chain restaurants and fast-food joints, more than ever, supplanted a lot of the local down-home places that formerly one could find with ease across the South. I finally found the kind of down-home place I had been searching for, Grannie’s Country Cookin’, on US 301 in Starke, Florida, and it was worth the wait. The Jurassic-sized slab of meatloaf and the giant flaky biscuit and the grits and mashed potatoes and gravy were what I’d expect at a place called Grannie’s, and not some pseudo chain Grannie’s. But the average age of the patrons was somewhere north of 60, so I had to wonder how long it will be until the entire country is homogenized, fast-foodified, Amazoned, Uberized, Facebookifed, plasticized, devicified, electronicuted. What will the roads, and the country, look like for the next solar eclipse to come here in seven years, in 2024?

It’s a disconcerting thought, and the roadsides, and our world, will be darker for it. And not because the sun is in eclipse.

All photos by the author.

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Anyone can be excused for thinking the stalemate we find ourselves in with North Korea is a bloody mess without any really good outcomes, and they might well be right. It isn’t the first time we’ve been stalemated with North Korea, though the stakes and potential consequences are rising with a nuclear DPRK. So here I come to wade into this situation, which has proven intractable since the Korean War drew to a close on July 27, 1953, not with a victory for either side, but with an armistice that stopped the fighting and left both North and South in a state of war that has continued until today.

I don’t claim to be a Korea expert, and neither am I a proficient war gamer or military planner, so I want to make that clear up-front. But I do know a bit about international relations and can see what often works, and doesn’t work, in dealing with rogue states like North Korea, and also have peripherally followed U.S. dealings with Pyongyang over the past couple of decades. So those are my bases for offering the analysis that follows.

Unfortunately, in the current situation it’s easier to engage in Monday Morning Quarterbacking, to look at all the things done wrong by previous administrations rather than offering any reasonable alternatives looking forward. But those past bad decisions can offer some guidance about what doesn’t work with North Korea, if not what might.

I’d like to start by debunking some of the myths that people hold about North Korea and its leadership. Perhaps the most common one is that Kim Jong-un, the chubby 33-year-old with the funny haircut who serves as current Supreme Leader of the DPRK, is a madman, deranged, or some sort of a nut case. While no one can argue that he’s not idiosyncratic or a tad bizarre, that is a long way from being mentally deranged. Was Hitler, or Saddam, or Stalin, or Mao, or any of the other mass murderer-leaders of the past century, mad? On some level, perhaps, but that does not mean they did not run their respective states according to a plan and set of objectives that they had set out, and drove toward them with a singular purpose of mind and relentless brutality. It is no different with Kim Jong-un, really, and a huge mistake to simply write him off as a nut job.

The other thing I think it’s important to understand, and which even I have only recently come to better appreciate, is that the common goal of all of North Korea’s leaders, including its current one, is reunification of the Korean peninsula and people under one government – theirs. While Kim Jong-un threatens and goads the U.S., it is more because he sees the U.S. as a threat to his regime and his goal of Korean unification. The flip side of that, of course, is that the U.S. stands as the major defender of South Korea’s existence and freedom, and relinquishing that role is really not an option. So we are pitted in an intractable face-off with the North Korean regime.

One would think that the prosperity and progress South Korea has made in recent decades would serve to bolster the South’s position and eventually lead to the demise of the North from within. Still, it’s estimated that something like 30 percent of South Koreans would like to see unification with the North, and a large proportion of the North’s population, brainwashed as they might be, are staunchly loyal to their country, as well as to its regime and ideology. The thought that we might see a popular uprising that leads to the overthrow of Communism in the North, such as what we saw in Eastern Europe, is at best wildly optimistic and, at worst, delusional. What we see in North Korea is not just imposition of a social, economic, and political system, but a cult of personality, built around the Supreme Leaders, and the pervasive feeling of persecution and misunderstanding by the outside world.

Which leads us to the current stalemate and how to approach it. Arguably, previous administrations never should have allowed North Korea to become a nuclear state. The time to take firm action to prevent this really goes back to the Clinton administration, but instead of direct action that administration resorted to wishful thinking, offering concession after concession to North Korea, instead of standing firm and not allowing itself to be duped. Things weren’t much better under the Bush administration, and of course the Obama administration preferred to ignore the whole thing rather than stand up to Pyongyang. So now it falls to the Trump administration to try to clean up the mess it has inherited from previous administrations.

There has been much drivel issued in the media about how Pres. Trump’s threats to Kim Jong-un are inflammatory and risk destabilizing things. It’s hard to imagine how things can be any more destabilized than they were anyway, and that destabilization lies with North Korea. Trump was just trying to term things in the same kind of rhetoric as Kim Jong-un uses. I don’t know if the President actually expected that to get through to the Supreme Leader any more effectively than the usual diplomatic garble does, but it’s more humorous than anything, since what Kim Jong-un and the North Koreans do and say goes beyond rhetoric. Like any bully, they can use any kind inflammatory language they like, but speaking back to them in their own language doesn’t deter they from being any more of a bully than they are. So like North Korean rhetoric, I have to assign Trump’s rhetoric as being issued for public consumption rather than anything operational.

My big concern about the President’s threats is that they verge into the category of Obama’s useless “red line” threats to Bashar al-Assad in Syria. It’s not a good strategy to make threats one can’t or won’t enforce, just like it’s not usually a good idea to pretend you have a gun when dealing face-to-face with an armed gunman. The temptation is there to call the question, and Kim Jong-un showed himself as perfectly willing to call that question, just as Assad did with Obama, when he threatened to send missiles near – though notably not at – Guam. Not the threat of a madman, but the carefully calculated response of a clever actor on the world stage.

The administration did score an enormous victory this past week in getting an unanimous vote of the UN Security Council – including China and Russia in support – approving massive new economic sanctions against North Korea. This was a real accomplishment on the part of our UN Ambassador, Nikki Haley. Now one might wish that more than the third of the DPRK’s exports would be subject to the sanctions, but I would think that the limitation was important to gaining the support of China and Russia. Additionally, I think China’s oil exports to North Korea were not subject to the sanctions for the same reason.

The problem with any sanctions is that, with a regime such as North Korea’s, most of the impact falls on the general population rather than on the regime itself. North Korea has shown repeatedly that it’s willing to let its people starve to death rather than give in to demands of the outside world. This time will probably be no exception to that. So I wouldn’t put a huge expectation on the sanctions making any difference.

From anyone’s perspective – including even that of China and Russia – the real danger that North Korea poses is its nuclear capability. It certainly is a real and immediate danger to South Korea and the other countries of the region, and once it develops a means of delivering a nuclear warhead, a real danger to the U.S. and much of the rest of the world. And that delivery capability might not be that far off.

Much has been said that the North Koreans don’t have an ICBM that would enable a nuclear warhead to survive re-entry, and also that their ability to aim their missiles is less than competent. But they are making strides, and resolving these issues is clearly on their agenda and possibly within their grasp. But given these shortcomings, the North Koreans may still be able to inflict severe damage on the U.S. with only one, or a few, nuclear warheads that they send into orbit and detonate while over the U.S. This would lead to the dreaded electromagnetic pulse (EMP), which would effectively cripple our entire electronic and electric infrastructure, putting us into something close to the Stone Age. And we are completely unprepared for such an attack. A North Korean satellite already passes over the U.S. every 12 hours, so that capability is not simply notional.

There also is the threat of cyber warfare, for which we’re also not particularly well prepared, and in fact North Korea could already be engaging in that kind of attack against us.

Again, arguably, it fell to the Clinton administration to have eliminated North Korea’s developing nuclear capability at that time, when it was far less evolved, dispersed, and dug-in than it is now. But that didn’t happen, and the carrots offered then were ineffectual, so now we have to deal with it. The question for the Trump administration – or any administration, really – is whether we can live with a nuclear North Korea or not. Given the risks as I’ve outlined them, I think we might have a real and, if not present, future danger in allowing North Korea to further develop its nuclear capability. In saying that, I know similar things were said about Soviet, and then Chinese, and even Pakistani and Indian nuclear capabilities, and of course now Iranian nuclear capability, too. The one thing that differentiates the DPRK and Iran from the other cases is that we’re dealing with what have proven themselves to be rogue states. Whether that makes them any more prone to using nuclear weapons than the world’s other nuclear bad actors is a key question, but one I’m reluctant to delve into at this point given its scope.

If we are to attack North Korea militarily and not inevitably cause a blood bath in the South – the 10-plus million people living in Seoul, South Korea’s capital, are just 30 miles from the DPRK border, across which lie enormous artillery batteries that would rain death on Seoul – it would have to be a kind of blitzkrieg (lightning war) to simultaneously take out North Korea’s conventional military capability along with its nuclear and launch infrastructure. I think initially it is more critical to take out the conventional capability and then go back and finish rooting out and wiping out the nuclear infrastructure.

One problem is that North Korea today is not Poland in 1939, when Hitler conducted his blitzkrieg against it, and then against France and the Benelux Countries in 1940. How we could mass sufficient air, sea, and land power to make such a coordinated attack against North Korea before the North figured out what was going on and mount a preemptive strike against the South is, at best, an open question. One hopes that our intelligence about North Korea is better than it appears, but the North almost assuredly has its own intel capability, augmented by whatever support it would and does receive from China and Russia. While if we ever felt the need to launch a military attack against the North this – in my assessment – almost certainly would be how it would need to be done, it admittedly still isn’t a great answer.

Anyone who reads my essays knows that I like to offer solutions to the problems considered. I wish I could do that in this case. Alas, I don’t feel I can, other than in general prescriptive terms. I think we do need to keep North Korea from further developing its nuclear capabilities, for the reasons presented, but how we achieve that remains elusive. I think it will take action – diplomatic, economic, political, or other – by China to influence its maverick neighbor to curb its activities, but while that possibility might be growing closer, it’s still not something we can count on any time in the immediate future. Perhaps in the trade off of favors, threats, benefits, and costs the President is engaged in with the Chinese, something could be on the table to achieve this.

So there we are, in stalemate, with neither side about to resign, as they might were this simply a game of chess. Comments, thoughts, countervailing or other arguments welcomed.

This piece also appears on Medium. Follow me there, and here, and if you like the post please comment and share it.

My service as a U.S. consular officer in the late 1980s and early1990s quickly debased me of any previous open-borders ideas I might have had prior to that time. While serving as vice consul for the geographically largest consular district in the world, covering most of the South Pacific and part of the North Pacific, I came to realize how poorly our immigration system served the country. Our two-officer office – me and the consul, my immediate boss – processed some 21,000 non-immigrant visas (NIVs) and about 6,000 immigrant visas (IVs) annually. I personally handled about two-thirds of the NIV applications and about a third of the IV applications. To say that some of those IV interviews verged on the scary would be an understatement, and made me wonder about the quality of people we were admitting for permanent residence in the U.S.

What occurred to me then was that the U.S. badly needed to implement a points-based immigration system similar to what already was long in place in Canada as well as in Australia and New Zealand, and has since even been adapted by the UK. Not that it would supplant this country’s family-based immigration system, but rather would supplement it, while revising the family-based system of preferences. While other countries were getting the cream of the crop of immigrants, we were limited basically to what came over the transom with our chain-migration policies, and that was not always beneficial to the U.S.

During my tenure as vice-consul in Fiji, yet another seemingly hair-brained idea was introduced, the so-called Diversity Visa Program (DVP), better known as the visa lottery program. A brain child of Congress, it allowed people from many countries deemed to be “under-represented” among U.S. immigrants to compete in a lottery to obtain the right to apply for permanent residence status. Besides debasing the whole concept of U.S. residency, this scheme essentially opened up a new category of immigrant visas to anyone who could fill out a postcard or pay someone to do it for them, as if we didn’t already have enough immigrants coming to the U.S., many with no discernible skills.

Over the intervening quarter century I have seen limited progress in immigration reform, combined with some steps in the wrong direction, acerbated by an ill-informed and prejudiced public and media debate over immigration. With this past week’s introduction of the so-called RAISE Act (RAISE – not Reyes – standing for Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment), I am for the first time in more than 25 years seeing reforms introduced that actually seem to make some sense. And of course the naysayers immediately came out in force, spouting the same sorts of nonsense that have kept our immigration system stuck under a law that dates back some 65 years, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, as amended and modified by some less overriding intervening laws.

To begin to understand the forces arrayed against any real reform of our outmoded and ineffectual immigration policy, one needs to understand two truisms about what the major political parties hope to gain from immigration: The Democrats want cheap votes, and the Republicans want cheap labor. These two impulses are the biggest factors keeping things pretty much where they are, if not pushing them further in the wrong direction. And it is these same factors that are the biggest enemies of the American people at large and which help keep our economy in a low-growth mode in which real wages remain stagnant while the costs of the welfare state continue to grow.

It’s also important to understand that the U.S. is not a laggard when it comes to immigration. While it may no longer be strictly true that we admit more legal immigrants than all other countries in the world combined, it is true that we admit, by far, the largest number of legal immigrants each year – more than a million people – and that number does exceed the total number of immigrants admitted by all the other largest immigrant-welcoming countries of the world combined. At present, close to 45 million immigrants (both legal and illegal) live in the U.S. There are some 85 million people, or about 27 percent of the total population, who are immigrants or the U.S.-born children of immigrants.

There are a lot of myths and stereotypes about immigration and these help perpetuate our current system. One of those myths is that immigrants strengthen the economy and do better than native-born Americans. While this was once true, it has not been true in more than a quarter century, and since then, in general terms, immigrants tend to fare worse than the overall population. This fact is buttressed by the numbers that show that immigrants to the U.S. are far more likely to wind up in poverty than the native-born population. Here are some disturbing figures from the Center for Immigration Studies:

“Despite similar rates of work, because a larger share of adult immigrants arrive with little education, immigrants are significantly more likely to work low-wage jobs, live in poverty, lack health insurance, use welfare, and have lower rates of home ownership.

In 2014, 21 percent of immigrants and their U.S.-born children (under 18) lived in poverty, compared to 13 percent of natives and their children. Immigrants and their children account for about one-fourth of all persons in poverty.

Almost one in three children (under age 18) in poverty have immigrant fathers.

In 2014, 18 percent of immigrants and their U.S.-born children (under 18) lacked health insurance, compared to 9 percent of natives and their children.

In 2014, 42 percent of immigrant-headed households used at least one welfare program (primarily food assistance and Medicaid), compared to 27 percent for natives. Both figures represent an undercount. If adjusted for undercount based on other Census Bureau data, the rate would be 57 percent for immigrants and 34 percent for natives.

In 2014, 12 percent of immigrant households were overcrowded, using a common definition of such households. This compares to 2 percent of native households.

The lower socio-economic status of immigrants is not due to their being mostly recent arrivals. The average immigrant in 2014 had lived in the United States for almost 21 years.”

While laws are in place that are supposed to limit immigrants’ access to welfare and other public assistance programs – the idea being that newcomers to the country are supposed to be able to support themselves, or have sponsors that will support them until they can support themselves – so many exceptions are made, so many jurisdictions overlook the rules, and so many benefits are obtained through the U.S.-citizen children of immigrants, that immigrants tend to use social welfare programs at rates in excess of the native population. The two charts that follow(also from the Center for Immigration Studies) clearly demonstrate the numbers. The first one compares legal immigrants with the native population while the second one compares illegal immigrants, who do even worse and aren’t even supposed to be here, with the native population.

Another key element that is widely misunderstood, further evidenced by some of the silly things said in the days since the RAISE Act was unveiled, is the system of preferences under which our current immigration system operates. This system imposes strict numerical caps on different categories of immigrants from various countries, and creates serious distortions that those only peripherally familiar with the rules don’t understand. For instance, while there is no cap for the spouses or unmarried minor children or the parents of U.S. citizens, 21 years old and older, there are limits for just about every other category of immigrant.

The chart below shows the current (August 2017) preference limits for the various preference categories. It shows the dates when petitions would have had to be filed for intending immigrants in those categories, or preferences, to file their applications this month to be approved for immigrant visas. Depending on the country, these dates can vary significantly.

For instance, for the first preference, the unmarried son or daughter, 21 years or older, of a U.S. citizen (native-born or, more commonly, naturalized), their petition would have had to be filed prior to 2011 in most countries of the world to file their applications for visas beginning this month. But if they are a citizen of the Philippines, the petition would have had to have been filed in 2007, or in 1996 if they are a citizen of Mexico. In other words, perhaps the beneficiaries were 22 or 25 or 27 when the petition was initially filed, but now they are anywhere from 10 to 21 years older. And these time periods don’t include processing times, which can be a year or more, once the application is filed.

If the applicant subsequently marries after the petition is filed, they drop to the F3 category and the preference dates of it.

For a second preference applicant in the F2A category – the spouse or unmarried minor child of lawful permanent residents (LPRs) – the wait has been a little more than a year worldwide. Not too bad. But for the unmarried son or daughter of an LPR who was over 21 when the petition was filed, the wait jumps to six years for most countries, 10 years for citizens of the Philippines, and 21 years for citizens of Mexico. If that unmarried minor child subsequently marries, they’re completely out of luck since there is no category for married children of LPRs.

As the chart shows, things get worse as one goes down the preference categories, until reaching F4, the preference category for brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens, when the wait can be as long as 22 years. Now that is a lot better than when I was a consular officer, when the wait for some countries was as long as 120 and 150 years, but it’s still a very long time. In practical terms, what these very long wait times do is encourage people in those categories to come on visitor visas to the U.S. and then overstay their visas, hoping to find some other mode to become legal.

In fact, more than half of those qualifying for immigrant status are already in the U.S. in some sort of temporary or illegal status, changing status when their preference comes up or simply remaining illegally if their preference never comes up, which distorts the entire system and enables those who are willing to jump the queue and break our laws to gain an advantage.

Seeing the effect these very long wait times have on people, it has been my contention since my consular days that the brother/sister category should be eliminated altogether. And that is one of the things the RAISE Act sensibly does, along with dispensing with the DVP, which never should have been introduced in the first place. I’d further argue, to cut out much of the incentive for overstaying, that changing status in the U.S. also should be strictly limited to those categories of immigrants for which no preference limits exist.

What is very difficult, if not impossible, under our current system of chain migration is to migrate independently to the U.S. – something that once was allowed and frequently done. There are many highly qualified potential migrants who would love to immigrate here, but who are blocked by our system of family preferences. So what happens with many of these people? They wind up migrating to another country, and our loss is Canada’s or Australia’s or New Zealand’s gain. The same applies to graduates of U.S. colleges and universities who study under student visas and then are forced to go back home after graduation. We’ve educated these people, and then don’t reap the benefit of that education, passing it on somewhere else. Again, these are exactly the kinds of people we should be seeking through our immigration system, and who will gain points under the RAISE Act.

One of the dumbest arguments I heard this week came from U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. He said that the RAISE Act would destroy his state’s economy by blocking lower-level employees who work in hotel and agricultural jobs. First of all, if those are the only kinds of jobs available in the Palmetto State, South Carolina has more serious problems than the RAISE Act would cause. Of course, that’s not true, and there are more jobs in South Carolina and across the land that can use more highly skilled people to fill them. Additionally, there already are programs, such as the H-2A temporary agricultural worker visa, to address the demand for agricultural workers, not to mention a ready supply of illegal workers that Republicans like Sen. Graham seem all-to-eager to tolerate. Sen. Graham’s assertion actually reinforces the argument that our current immigration system funnels people into lower-level positions and helps depress wages across the board while forcing lower-skilled U.S. workers to compete with immigrants, legal and otherwise, for scarce jobs. It also fits neatly into the theory that Republicans support cheap labor.

Meanwhile, we’ve heard a chorus of objections from the Democrats, reinforcing the theory that nothing suits them better than easy, low-level immigration from which they hope to harvest cheap votes. Perhaps encapsulating some of the lame arguments on the left side of the house are that the RAISE Act invalidates the poem on the Statue of Liberty welcoming the world’s huddled masses – never a tenet of U.S. immigration policy or law – or that immigration would be limited to Anglophone countries, such as the UK or Australia, since knowledge of English would be one of the requirements for independent migration. As White House Senior Policy Adviser Stephen Miller ably pointed out, there are many English-speaking people around the world in just about every country, and all would be able to meet the language preference. Additionally, knowledge of English has long been a requisite for naturalization, and at one time in our more distant history was even a requirement to immigrate here.

In the past few days I’ve also heard some media people saying, well, they wouldn’t be here if the changes proposed in the RAISE Act were in place when their grandparents migrated here, and I fail to see the logic of this. First, they are here. Second, while they might be here, someone else, perhaps equally worthy, was excluded. And third, what might have been good for the country 100-some years ago isn’t necessarily good for the country today. Ironically, some of the people making the argument that we should keep our current system are the first ones to argue that the country is a different country today than it was in the past and it needs to change to keep up with the times.

The other argument that is raised is that the actual numbers of immigrants admitted would be cut from the current million-plus to about two-thirds that number, or roughly back to mid-1980s levels. This might be more in keeping with the ability of the country to absorb new immigrants, but in any case this number seems reasonable and can be adjusted over time. It is argued that the high level of immigration has kept the U.S. relatively competitive with European countries and other nations, but what is missing from that argument are the details that it is both younger immigrants and more highly skilled immigrants who can contribute to economic growth, rather than draw down on it. We need to regenerate a period when immigrants do better than the general population, as in the past, than worse than the general population, and the RAISE Act is a step in that direction.

Like any piece of proposed legislation, there should be debate and discussion, and probably some tweaks made, to the RAISE Act, which is sponsored by Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Sen. David Perdue of Georgia. But what I fear will happen will be bipartisan support to kill the proposed reforms, never letting the bill out of committee, in keeping with the divergent desires of the two parties that I stated above: The Dems will want to keep their cheap votes and the Republicans will want to keep their cheap labor, and the rest of us, and the country, will continue to suffer as a result.

This piece also appears on Medium. Follow me there, and here, and if you like the post please comment and share it.